I woke up this evening, and after a moment of looking at my RSS feeds, I
promptly told myself one thing: "That's enough Internet for tonight." I rarely
outright close NetNewsWire, but after seeing what was in my feeds, I decided it
would probably be better for my mental health to do just that.
I realized I hadn't looked into Gemini in a while, started reading into its
updates, and even attempted to get some clients working on Snow Leopard... The
keyword here is /attempted/. Nothing requiring Go or Rust would work, as those
langs wouldn't even install for me in MacPorts, so I looked at some that only
needed POSIX shell, bash, or something like that. Of them...only AV-98 actually
works. Everything else either needs to have some changes made to run on this
setup, or needs something else that needs Rust/Go itself, or just doesn't run
at all.
I kinda wrote off Gemini a while back for a few reasons, most notably because
of how many people took an almost puritan view of how people should handle
content on their capsules. However, what utterly killed my interest at the time
was the incident between Drew Devault and the Amfora browser, where the latter
wanted to add an /optional/ feature, and Devault was willing to block everyone
using the browser from his capsule if they added it. That sort of attitude, on
top of how much I'd seen from other parts of the community, just ended up
souring the whole thing for me. I don't blame solderpunk, or the community as a
whole. It's just that I was getting enough of that attitude from the web world,
and I didn't want to weigh myself down worrying about it from the Gemini crowd
as well.
That's why I went with Gopher. It's far simpler, the standard is set in a way
that people aren't really fighting over it constantly, and people are far more
/chill/ as a whole over here in comparison. I don't hate the protocol, I just
don't want to deal with problems when I've already been given a perception of
friction towards non-comformists.
And while having to stop writing to take a bathroom break, I realized exactly
what I felt: It seemed like Gemini's community was exclusionary, rather than
welcoming, much like how I see the modern Fediverse and webdev communities. It
felt like I was walking into judgement, not to a potential home on the internet
that I could find friends in. A lot of it comes from that first impression I
got back when Gemini first started gaining its community, but I still get a bit
of it occasionally when I see people talking about things they do there.
But that's also why I'm trying to get something running to look into it. I'd
use something like a web proxy, but a number of people block access from them,
so I kinda /have/ to use a client for it. In the end, I kinda just...gave up
and used Lagrange in my Windows 7 VM to get the job done.
In the end, it's not really what I'm wanting from the smolnet, but if it
makes people happy, I'm all for it being a thing. Communities can be exclusive
without doing so maliciously, just as some can be maliciously inclusive. I'm
glad to see more options available for those who just want to find their place
in the world.
I'll still stick to Gopher, but to those in Geminispace, I'm glad you're here
on the smolnet with us.
